Beginning on July 24, 2009 Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, at 435 South
Guadalupe Street in Santa Fe, New Mexico will present Recent Works:
Paintings and Neon, an exhibition of new paintings and neon sculptures
by internationally recognized French Artist, Francois Morellet. There
will be a reception on Friday, July 24, 2009, from 5-7 pm, and
the show continues through August 22, 2009. This show opens
concurrently with Cutting Edge, (which will be in the upstairs
galleries). Morellet’s neon sculpture will also be showing at Art Santa
Fe’s Project Space from July 23 through July 26, 2009 at El Museo
Cultural in Santa Fe.

Contemporary French painter, engraver, sculptor and light artist, Francois Morellet,
has an international reputation, especially in Germany and France, and
his work has been commissioned for public and private collections in
Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US.
Morellet’s art has played an important and ground-breaking role in
geometric abstraction over the past half century. Morellet uses a
simple pictorial language of geometric forms: mainly lines, as well as
squares and triangles, assembled into two-dimensional compositions. He
describes his use of lines, since 1952, as constituting four main
systems: “juxtaposition and superposition”, “interference”,
“fragmentation” and “chance”. He says, “For their sake I forsook, for
fifty-four years, other lines – indecisive, spontaneous or tormented –
that I had naively loved during the 1940’s”. In 1961 he was part of a
group that founded “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel” (GRAV). This
group of Kinetic artists explored the possibilities of the visual arts
in a scientific and experimental way. At this time, Morellet began his
work with neon tubes, following his interest in the luminosity of this
material. Recently, his work with lines, has grown into working with
strips of color. Many of his new pieces involve, as he puts it,
“confrontations between two inveterate antagonists, the line and the
strip: light pencil strokes and accumulations of broad, black acrylic
strips”. Morellet has also worked in other materials including fabric,
tape, and walls, among others, and has investigated the use of
exhibition space in terms similar to installation and environmental
art. Morellet uses rules and constraints established in advance to
guide the creation of many of his works, and allows chance to play a
role in some of his pieces. His rigorous use of geometry tends to
create emotionally neutral work, and places him close to Minimal and
Conceptual art in his aims. However, his provocative stance and sense
of humor place Morellet close to Dada in many ways. His works share an
affinity to the works of American artists such as Sol LeWitt, Donald
Judd, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly.